More on distraction – from that article linked in the last post:
“When the jackhammers fire up outside my window, in other words, I rarely ignore them—I throw the window open, watch for a while, bring the crew sandwiches on their lunch break, talk with them about the ins and outs of jackhammering, and then spend an hour or two trying to break up a little of the sidewalk myself.”

It’s funny because right now I feel like a good chunk of my brain is ready to hack into the studies I must do, but there is literally all sorts of jackhammers going on outside my window. Not metaphorical, REAL. I can’t fucking concentrate for the life of me. I am imagining me going over there convincing the ajashi to hand over the jackhammer so I could do it for a while.

I guess I musta been busy or sumpn because I just started to get a bit of rhythm going here then lost it for a week or so.

Just read an interesting article on attention, distraction etc. here. Interesting. I sure as hell don’t feel like I have the little bit of centeredness I once did. Life is a dizzy blur these days. I haven’t meditated for over a year. (Well okay – that article motivated me to sit down for five minutes and try.) And you know sometimes I can see how the harshness of life and how I am approaching these days is literally biting me – I can see it in the way I hold my face.

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I have been selling some stuff on ebay. Stuff that’s in Australia. Guitar foot pedals I left there at christmas. So far 6 out of nine done with no major hassles.

Well, that whole thing of changing the name of swine flu over to 1a81i111 flu was a scorching fucking success, eh? Well done. It didn’t work. Every news service I’ve seen is still calling it Swine Flu.

It’s interesting I think. Naming stuff. I find it ironic that it was the pig-eating industry that was losing money bigtime, and were the ones pushing to have the name changed, when essentially it was their doing that got the virus crossed over from pigs to people in the first place.

I’m too far gone to change the theme of my english studies master’s thesis for next year now. It’s going to be on the grunge scene, but what would’ve been far more original is doing it on the nature of naming things. It’s one of my hidden talents—naming things. Maybe I can do my PHD on that. Then I will found a thinktank that can be hired out for vast sums of money when someone like a govt or a gigantic corporation needs help thinking up a name. Because the Tank will be independent of any nation we’ll probably take up residence on a secret island somewhere to the west of Japan, like on Thunderbirds.

For example, if Obama had come to me to ask what a good new name for the swine flu is, I would’ve said like the title; the Pig.

“I was going to go for a bike ride today but I’m feeling a bit under the weather. In fact, I think I’ve got the Pig.”

Well I’m glad that whole swine flu thing sorted itself out. Although I think part of me was disappointed it didn’t end up like this:

But when the world, in all it’s supreme idiocy decided that we can’t call it swine flu any more because it was hurting pork sales, they should’ve come to me, me Jerry to think up a new name. I saw a bit of news that was showing how ground zero was an industrial pig farm down in old Mexico—reminded me of the chaco chicken episode of The X Files. And so, it should’ve been renamed, “You Greedy Pig! flu” after the greedy capos who are responsible for it. I’ll bet it was a result of them making pigs eat pigs.

As part of my grungy researchen I’m reading the book, Our Band Could Be Your Life by Michael Azerrad. Real good. Definite pattern of -band rises—band peaks – band declines. Of course I’d always known of sonic youth and a few of the others, but the best chapter I’ve read so far has been on The Minutemen. They seemed really cool. Been listening to ‘Double Nickels on the Dime” – very different in some ways.

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The last WW2 submarine movie I watched was a gooden – ‘We dive at dawn’ – this was in part the reason why I have been trawling through this odd little subgenre. I had this faint fragment of a memory of watching some old b&w film one night in Geelong where there was a sub at dock that was being refuelled. This was that movie. It’s English. The English are so quaint.

The next era is cold war. Watched two already – The Bedford Incident, which sounds English, but is actually american, or maybe—it has some american actors and an english guy pretending to be german. It was filmed in england. There was a touch of Dr.Strangelove style humour in there, but mostly it was pretty serious, and it was about how accidentally nuking the planet is a serious issue.

The other was right out the other end. It was cold war/UFO fusionfood. As much as I like UFOs I had to turn it off halfway through because I was tired and there was no real submarines in it. It was just people in a studio. Plus it was pretending that spaceage gigantic submarines existed, which they don’t.